Twitter was hit by a service outage affecting users around the world on Thursday morning, though the precise number of people affected isn’t clear.
Those experiencing the problem were met with the message: “Tweets aren’t loading right now. Try again.”
Data from Downdetector, which monitors events like this, suggested the outage started shortly after 8 a.m. ET. Twitter’s support team hit the social media service at around 9:30 a.m ET to acknowledge the problem, saying: “Some of you are having issues accessing Twitter and we’re working to get it back up and running for everyone. Thanks for sticking with us.”
The service appeared to be restored for most users by around 10:30 a.m. ET, though at the time of writing, Twitter’s status page continues to show the message: “We are currently investigating this issue.
The outage is a rare event for Twitter and it has yet to offer any explanation as to why it happened.
As usual, plenty of folks had fun with the disruption, though it may have frustrated some in the Twitter community who rely on the service for work or other activities.
We've all been through this last couple of the hours#TwitterDown #Twitter pic.twitter.com/JjlK2P3pW1
— Kindgeek (@kindgeeks) July 14, 2022
Everyone coming back to Twitter every 5 minutes to see if it’s still down 😭😭#Twitter #TwitterDown pic.twitter.com/1JXbQvvvsr
— PELS YEAR. BBN (@pelsyear) July 14, 2022
And the ol’ favorite:
Twitter was down and we couldn't tweet about it. #Twitter pic.twitter.com/VcfeoWlpPA
— Technext (@technextdotng) July 14, 2022
Twitter’s latest outage follows a couple of similar events that hit the social media service last year. In June 2021, for example, another issue that disrupted the service for millions of accounts globally took the company about three hours to sort out. However, unlike this latest problem, it affected only the desktop site and not Twitter’s mobile app.
And in October another outage occurred as people were flocking to the site to express frustration about disruption on Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram in what was clearly a case of particularly bad timing.
